A meditation teacher reflects on identifying with her former self
Martine Batchelor

“That is Martine just before I shaved her head,” the monk exclaimed. He pointed to the inside of a souvenir book featuring photographs of past residents at Songgwangsa, a Zen temple in southwestern Korea. Everyone else recognized the woman in the photograph. I did not. The woman, of course, was me.
I had never seen the picture. It captured a young lady with glasses and long dark hair, about 22 years old. I took a photo of the photo for my record.
Whenever I look at the image, I have the same strange feeling of non-identification. I don’t feel that I know who this person is: What was she like? What were her hopes and aspirations?
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Bodh Gaya, it is said, is the number one place to go to realize that you don’t need to go to Bodh Gaya. The small town in India is famous for one reason: here, the Buddha achieved spiritual enlightenment under a ficus tree some twenty-five centuries ago. Some regard the place as a spiritual mecca.
But Buddhists have no mecca, strictly speaking. There are four Buddhist holy sites in the Indian subcontinent—Lumbini, Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, and Kushinagar—where the Buddha was born, was enlightened, first preached, and died, respectively—but visiting any of them is non-obligatory for even the most devout people. Despite the long tradition of pilgrims journeying to these holy sites, there is nothing in the teachings mandating that Buddhists visit.
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In the harsh environment of a Rhode Island men’s prison, a group of 50 inmates are transforming their lives through the practice of meditation.

Acharya Fleet Maull is the founder of Prison Dharma Network, Peacemaker Institute, and National Prison Hospice Association. Learn more about Maull's work and the Prison Dharma Network in Tricycle's interview with the teacher, and watch his Tricycle Retreat here.
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At a press conference on Monday, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that “new analysis” had confirmed Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 had crashed into the southern Indian Ocean. As with other developments in the international mystery, news channels quickly displayed footage of the victims’ families bunkered in a hotel conference room.
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Mark C. Taylor recounts a poignant lover affair not with a person but with a place that, paradoxically, cannot be easily localized. For many years, Taylor has lived in the Berkshire Mountains, where he writes and creates land art and sculpture. In a world of mobile screens a virtual realities, where speed is the measure of success and place is disappearing, his work slows down thought and brings life back to earth to give readers time to ponder the importance of place before it slips away.
Idleness
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A discussion with clinical and Buddhist practitioners Polly Young-Eisendrath and Pilar Jennings

In this exclusive conversation, a psychoanalyst and a relational psychoanalyst—both practicing Buddhists—discuss the emotional dynamics of religious practice, the psychological complexities of student-teacher relationships, and the issues surrounding the idealization of teachers within Buddhist communities.
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LOS ANGELES—The International Mindfulness Foundation (IMF) today announced the discovery of a fifth noble truth, overturning the ancient Buddhist belief that there are only four. Speaking at a press conference at UCLA, IMF president Hugh Briss reported that researchers in the US and UK, using the latest quantum MRI technology, had scanned the brains of more than 100 select meditators to locate the fifth center of noble-truth activity in a part of the striatum normally associated with lust and desire, an area previous researchers had overlooked.
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In a profession famous for its metropolitan Jews, late comedian and filmmaker Harold Ramis was a practicing Buddhist…and, well, a metropolitan Jew. He is well known for directorial achievements in American hilarity like Caddyshack and Groundhog Day—the latter carrying some intricate Buddhist underpinnings. Over the course of his later life, Ramis deepened his relationship with Buddhism, which culminated in a visit with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. That life came to a sudden end last month, when Ramis died of a rare blood vessel disease. He was only 69 years old.
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On an autumn afternoon, poet Mark Doty arrived at the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care to join its founders, Koshin Paley Ellison and Robert Chodo Campbell, in a conversation spanning grief, loss, attention, aging, and death.
Doty has published five volumes of nonfiction prose and eight books of poems, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. His poems have been widely anthologized and have also appeared in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, Ploughshares, Poetry, The New Yorker, and, of course, Tricycle.
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How are we to approach the crisis of self-immolations in Tibet?
Janet Gyatso

The way I want to talk about the current crisis of self-immolations by Tibetans may be risky for a scholar in academia. This is not merely because it critiques how my field has tended to address the topic. More basically, it departs from the usual mode of scholarly writing altogether.
I composed the following reflections without an initial plan or even an idea of what I would say. Nor was I sure of their full implications upon completion. And yet, in the particular case at hand, I think the fact that I wrote out of an immediate and even instinctive sort of intuition made an important realization possible. Or perhaps more accurately, what made it possible was that I was obeying an imperative that I had discerned—a demand on myself—to try and say something about my intuition, even if it didn’t stand as an entirely consistent scholarly principle.
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I've discovered an excellent way to end Meditation Month: I'm going to commit to sit through the month of March. Who's with me!?
Image: The Trike team in our new offices, which we moved into this Monday. (L-R): Emma Varvaloucas, Managing Editor; Andrew Gladstone, Digital Media Producer; Joanna Piacenza, Web Manager; Alex Caring-Lobel, Associate Editor.
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February is Meditation Month! The Tricycle team members have challenged ourselves—and our readers—to meditate every day and blog about our experiences. We needed a little help, so we called in bestselling author and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg to lead our meditation-themed retreat this month and speak to us on how to incorporate meditation practice into the workplace.
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The photo op is irresistible. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, donning radiant maroon and saffron robes, sits alongside none other than a fully suited Mr. Barack Obama. His Holiness’s unapologetic, balding head and exposed right bicep are a spectacle in the formally clothed, carefully guarded land of Washington, DC. On display are two very different global juggernauts.
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In a new article over at The New Republic, senior editor Evgeny Morozov questions the agendas of tech companies that advocate "unplugging" and technological solutions like apps in response to the digital onslaught that has become a fact of daily life. "We are being urged to unplug," writes Morozov in "The Mindfulness Racket," "so that we can resume our usual activities with even more vigor upon returning to the land of distraction."
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February is Meditation Month! The Tricycle team members have challenged ourselves—and our readers—to meditate every day and blog about our experiences. We needed a little help, so we called in bestselling author and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg to lead our meditation-themed retreat this month and speak to us on how to incorporate meditation practice into the workplace.
More »

February is Meditation Month! The Tricycle team members have challenged ourselves—and our readers—to meditate every day and blog about our experiences. We needed a little help, so we called in bestselling author and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg to lead our meditation-themed retreat this month and speak to us on how to incorporate meditation practice into the workplace.
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The invisibility of the crisis in San Francisco right now is reminiscent of that of the AIDS epidemic. To quote from Vito Russo, a founder of the AIDS activist group ACT UP, film historian, and rabble rouser, it’s “like living through a war which is happening only for those people who happen to be in the trenches.” He lived in this city when it was a haven for political radicals, queer people, artists, and immigrants, when it was America’s great city of sanctuary.
“You look around and you discover that you’ve lost more of your friends, but nobody else notices,” he said. “It isn’t happening to them.”
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Yup, there's another one.
Last year, we told you about the Buddhist theme park in Singapore that vividly displays the various hells you can get yourself into. On the off-chance that you're looking for a vacation destination that's a little more PG-rated—but still with that Buddhist twist—you're in luck!
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